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Season Twelve Episode Four Preceded by: Season Twelve, Episode Three: Small Damn Heroes Followed by: Season Twelve, Episode Five: Ain't Never Had An Acquaintance Like Me Summary :It is a rainy morning on June 14th, three days since the Awakening. The battery from Vishnu's mech will only power one Speakstone at once, so Avi and Ashra work out alternating days to use it for each of their stones. The party breaks camp, summons the day's elephant, and sets off on the road towards Malagasy. : They pass a dwarven caravan headed the other way. These dwarves have lost everything; they march sadly onward, pulling their wagons with cows which they try fruitlessly to whip a bit more speed out of. The party lets them pass without a meeting. : A lone traveler along the road catches sight of the party and approaches, begging them for water. With Leilah's spells gone, no one has any to give. Semna tells him the location of a well three days march away, and gives him some bottles of wine, the only potable she has to offer. He thanks her, pledges to travel at night, and trudges off. : The party walks for a long time. Everything here seems to be dead; all the plants are wilted away and no new growth is forthcoming, though this should be the height of summer. This is the Greater Nyasa Valley, and it is not meant to look so barren. After some discussion the party realizes that the Haverstad probably salted the earth when it flooded. : They walk on. Eventually they spot a flaming village in the distance. Screaming halflings are fleeing towards the road. There is a pillar of smoke rising a mile high. Category:Episodes Category:Season Twelve Episodes : Semna offers to fly around and scout and is gone before the party can raise the "but aren't you blind?" point. She swoops off towards the village and reaches it before long. She can hear shouts in the halfling language, and she inhales salt vapor. She senses something there. She smells sulfur, a distinctly extraplanar scent. : Suddenly a creature rises, and she hears it bellow "THIRSTY!" in Abyssal. She offers it some wine in the same language and tosses a bottle to it, but despite her extremely persuasive phrasing it continues to chase the woman who just threw something at its head. She heads back towards the party at full speed. : The party, meanwhile, has been attempting to watch through Ashra's telescope, since Semna is way out of range. As Semna heads back towards them, Leilah identifies the creature following her as a balor. This is Very Bad News. Perhaps with rest, spells, and time to prepare, the party might be confident about this, but in their current state things look bad. : Leilah tells Cicero to pull out all the stops. He reaches into the party loot bag and pulls out a scroll with "FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY, <3 LEILAH" written across it. He reads out the scroll of Haste, and everyone in the party is suddenly moving much faster. : Leilah shouts out her standard briefing while the party braces for battle. The balor's flaming whip will catch people and burn them, its sword will cut people's heads off, it is immune to several elements and resistant to others, it could theoretically summon more of its kind, and when it dies, it will cause a massive explosion centered on its own body. : Leilah curses the time lost to telling the party this and gets up all the buffs she has prepared. The balor is upon them. : Cicero and Aether coordinate attacks to strike the balor together, while Leilah attacks it on her own. Semna realizes the balor is stranded on the Prime for the first time, and that for the first time it is feeling the mortal needs of hunger and thirst, hence its cries. She continues offering it wine. It seems to almost listen to her, but prefers to attack the party. : The balor grabs Aether with its whip and pulls her against its flaming body. Ashra flies into its reach and pops Aether out of time. The balor retaliates, but Ashra dodges most of the blows and comes out all right. Aether lacks the strength of will to return early from Ashra's time exile, but she will live. : Leilah and Cicero continue to fight the balor, with Cicero dashing back and forth and Leilah holding its attention in melee. Semna keeps trying to make peace with it. The balor eventually dominates her, then permits her to fly up by its head and pour twenty bottles of wine at once into its mouth. : The party decides they need to turn the battle around. They force it to fail its save against Leilah's Destruction, only to find it is immune to such magic. Oh wait they actually forced it to fail a save against Ashra's mindblast instead. : Cicero is glad to flee the scene, as is Semna once the Dark Lantern in Ashra's hand frees her from the balor's mind control. But both Leilah and Ashra want to be the one to kill the beast -- Leilah with her sword, Ashra by extracting its brain. Finally Leilah points out that they don't have much time and they might as well both try. Ashra agrees, then realizes at the last minute that she can't buff herself enough to survive the balor's death throes, much less its flaming body. She begs Leilah for a moment to teleport away, which Leilah grudgingly grants. : Leilah stabs the stunned balor with her blade. It roars and explodes in a massive fireball. The ground is blackened in a wide radius. When the party returns from their various hiding places, they find Leilah wiping the soot out of her eyes.